Battle Fatigue

As a Thomas Pynchon fan, of course I was psyched for One Battle After Another (2025), P.T. Anderson's adaptation of Vineland. Of course, like most Pynchon, Vineland is unfilmable - but he did a good job on Inherent Vice, so let's see how it goes.

We're thrown right into the movie, with an attack on an ICE holding camp by a group of revolutionaries who call themselves the French 75. Ghetto Pat, AKA Rocketman (Leonardo DiCaprio) is the demolition man, and lover of Perfidia Hollywood Hills (Teyana Taylor). Taylor is mad for this kind of action, taking every chance to fight, sling a slogan, and love up DiCaprio. It definitely turned him on. So when she finds Col. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), she orders him to stand - that is, get himself hard. 

In fact, they later hook up. 

Taylor and DiCaprio get married, and have a baby. DiCaprio wants to settle down, take care fo the kid, but Taylor is too much into the thrill of revolution. She kills a hostage in a bank robbery and is finally captured. Penn offers her amnesty for information, and when he threatens her daughter, she cracks. Most of French 75 are killed in a long montage. By the way, this is a comedy? Taylor goes into witness protection, but slips away to Mexico.

Sixteen years later, DiCaprio is living in a little northern California town (not Vineland, though). He lives in a shack, smoking dope and seeing feds everywhere. His daughter, Charlene AKA Willa (Chase Infiniti - how Pynchonesque!) is a fine young girl, active in high school and Benicio del Toro's dojo. 

Meanwhile, Penn has been moving up in the ranks. He gets an offer to join a secret, silly, Santa-worshipping white supremacist group. But if they find out that he had a black lover (Taylor), and maybe even a mixed race daughter (Infiniti), he would be cast out. So he starts looking for her.

Word of this gets back to DiCaprio through the remnants of the French 75 underground. While he tries to find out some info - and getting nowhere because he is too stoned to remember the underground codes and passwords. Maybe he wasn't paying much attention, anyway. OK, this is comedy. 

It ends up with a three-way chase and fight between Penn's forces, DiCaprio and the underground, and Infiniti, a very capable young woman. At least she remembers the recognition code, "Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillis, Hooterville Junction" - from The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. 

Parts of this movie were great, maybe all, but only in parts. It just didn't really hold together for us. Our main problem was that the comedy of very real repression and somewhat silly violent revolution was lost on us. Pynchon's message that revolution and repression are human, and therefore fucked up and fundamentally goofy is fine when the struggle is against, say, Reaganism. But we're living with immigrants and citizen being rounded up and even shot in the streets, and we just can't laugh at it. We don't see any armed struggle against it, not even one made up of sexed up thrill junkies. Anyway, the movie shows that most of them are only playing revolutionary. It left a sour taste.

Which is too bad, because many things do come across. DiCaprio's stoned dingbat trying to cope with an immediate emergency was actually comical. Most of the action was quite effective - the final car chase on long, rolling, empty California highways is pretty and thrilling, although maybe a bit long. 

One part I did like was that, like in Vineland, Taylor just sort of fades away. She isn't killed, she doesn't show up to save the day or otherwise. She's out of the picture, in the wind, a concept, a shadow, a myth, either idol or traitor. And Taylor sells the part so well that even her absence has a presence.